Unicorns... and far more silly concepts

Do you believe in unicorns? Me neither. Dragons, then? Thought not. Alright then, how about an all-powerful creator of the universe who pervades time and space and can witness every thing that you do and every thought that you think? Whoa Nellie – let’s just stick with horned horses and firebreathers for now!

Even at their comparatively short remove from plausibility, too few people believe in unicorns to muster a respectable congregation of horned horse worshippers. But consider how much further removed from plausibility God is. Unicorns are not assumed to interfere in human affairs. A Unicorn that did would be a more implausible beast than one that simply trots around the forest munching moss. Now, more implausible still is the Unicorn that, not content with simply sticking its nose into towns and villages from time to time, interferes in ALL human affairs. Busy Unicorn, but nothing compared to one that not only interfered in all affairs, but has power over them. If that isn’t bad enough, here comes the next one, who not only has power over them but guides and ordains them to the last detail. Still, even he doesn’t last long, being displaced with a swift kick from a Unicorn that, despite being the puppetmaster of all, is somehow able to invest his human puppets with choice and responsibility for their actions.

We are barely halfway there yet. Here comes a unicorn that can raise you from the dead. After that, a unicorn that can raise everyone from the dead, even those whose bodies have rotted down to bones; after that, one who raises everyone from the dead and then proceeds to send them either to eternal bliss or everlasting agony without reprieve. Naturally, this unicorn also possesses infallible judgement. By now, we are not even in the same galaxy as plausibility. But hold on for the grand finale: the unicorn that can do all this, and who created the very universe, perchance with a few deft stirs of his magic horn. A unicorn who could exist before the universe. A unicorn who will outlast it. Now at last we have the cerosequine counterpart of God.

Astronomy

The stars. Sirius, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Alkaid, Dubhe, Arcturus, Vega, Alpha Centauri... the tiny and unwilting flowers of the dark, of the vastness, blooming for us, waiting for our spaceships as if for pollinators. We feel for them with the antennae of our telescopes, but never fly out to find them. How frustrating to have been born in the 20th Century, when attempts at them first got off the ground, when men people first left the Earth in body as well as imagination, only for the entire project to have stopped dead in the early Seventies. In centuries, perhaps millenia to come, we will surely be out there, it's maddeningly certain - but not now, oh not now, now all we have is the moon fizzing on our tongue, a first tantalising taste of human presence in space. The last space shuttle has already been mothballed. Things are so bad that Richard Branson has supplanted Nasa as our best hope of a chauffeur onward into the heavens...
Still, they will always have that extraordinary magic of being signals from the past. No, more than that: actual visitors from the past, real time travllers here in our present night sky. Sirius is a traveller from about six years ago: who was I six years ago when the light I am seeing from that fierce blue point first left its surface? The light hasn't gone: perhaps then neither has than person, perhaps he is, as I write, just zipping past the Sirius sytem, squinting and sweating in the glare of the huge young star, and from there passing inexorably onward. What an irony: we ourselves must lose our past the moment it is created, but  it grows instantly into the universe, ripples and ripples of it bursting out to find new presents, done with ours. And they can never be stopped, their thirst for new being is insatiable.
Some thoughts, anyway, on the stars.